instruction
Library school survey results
Saturday, September 27th, 2008A few weeks ago, I posted a survey to Survey Monkey to get people’s views about their library school education and what they think should be taught in library school that isn’t (or wasn’t when they were in school). The 91 responses I got were really interesting and I wanted to post them so everyone [...]
Consistency or effectiveness in instruction and assessment
Sunday, September 7th, 2008The part of my still new-ish job that causes my the most worry is assessment. I’d hoped to have time this summer to do some serious research on information literacy assessment and get some good ideas for how to best assess library instruction this Fall. However, I got too busy with other, more pressing, tasks [...]
Reinventing the Rook Tour
Monday, August 25th, 2008Last week was one of the most stressful, but also most satisfying, weeks I’ve had at work. That week, we did our “rook tours” which are orientations to the library for the new Freshmen entering the Corps of Cadets (our school’s population is around 50% ROTC). For three days a week before classes start, we [...]
The best laid plans of mice and Meredith
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008It’s amazing how I manage to delude myself year after year. Every spring I make a list of projects I want to get done in the summer when I “have more time.” And every year, I barely get through any of them. This year I was really optimistic about what I could accomplish and I’m [...]
Loex 2008 goes online!
Monday, April 28th, 2008I got this email about LOEX 2008 Encore from Catherine Pellegrino at Saint Mary’s College and wanted to spread the word:
The annual LOEX conference is trying something new as an experiment this year: three of their breakout sessions will be presented as live, interactive webcasts a few weeks after the conference: http://www.loexconference.org/2008/virtualsessions.htm
I think this is [...]
Chutes and ladders
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008In spite of the fact that I’ve had one of those all-day sinus headaches, I’m walking on a cloud. Starting April 1, I’m going to be the Head of Instructional Initiatives here at Norwich, which means that I will lead and coordinate all instruction (and most assessment) work at the library. I’m also going to [...]
Building 21st century librarians AND libraries
Sunday, March 9th, 2008There were three recent posts that got me thinking a lot about the growing necessity to have tech-savvy people in public services positions. The first was Dorothea Salo’s post about how many librarians outside of Systems see learning about (or doing anything with) technology as being something outside of their sphere of responsibility. The second [...]
Getting out of a rut
Sunday, February 17th, 2008Since our Coordinator of Public Services left, I’ve been the liaison to the social sciences along with being the liaison to the School of Graduate Studies (whose programs are all online). That means that I’m basically the liaison to over 2/3 of the Norwich population, but it made good sense because of my strong background [...]
We have wiki!
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008Library Research Guides wiki
Originally uploaded by librarianmer
A while back, I wrote about the challenges I had in finding the right platform for our subject guides. Well, I’m pleased to say that I just linked to our subject guides from the front page of the library [...]
At the top of my must-read list
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008I can’t wait to get my hands on this!
Information Literacy Programs in the Digital Age: Educating College and University Students Online
Edited by Alice Daugherty and Michael F. Russo, ACRL
Information Literacy Programs in the Digital Age: Educating College and University Students Online describes significant and innovative online instruction programs in a straightforward, narrative way, focusing [...]
When are we doing enough?
Saturday, December 1st, 2007Since I got to Norwich, my main priority has been to ensure that the distance learners have access to all the information they need to do research through the library. I have information all over the place about our resources and services. I’ve created screencast tutorials, HTML tutorials and FAQs. Some of the tutorials are [...]
Online learning and its impact on public libraries
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007I’ve been wanting to comment on this thought-provoking post by Carleen at Woodsy + Wired (a pretty new blog) for a few weeks now and just haven’t had the time. But almost every day, her post has been on my mind.
In Effects of distance learning on public libraries, Carleen writes about her library’s struggles [...]
Should we take off those training-wheels?
Sunday, October 7th, 2007no more training wheels
Originally uploaded by shadycat
I’ve been reading a number of interesting posts on the “training-wheels culture” from Dorothea Salo, Nicole Engard, and Emily Clasper. As I’ve been doing a lot of teaching — both online and in-person workshops — it’s an issue I’ve [...]
Respect my Authority
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007When I read Michael Gorman’s two-part blog post (yes, I said blog post; if that isn’t the height of irony…) to respect the wisdom of the expert over the wisdom of the crowd, I thought of two people: Ayn Rand and Eric Cartman. The piece had all of Ayn Rand’s black-and-white, either-or thinking as well [...]
Do they care what they’re looking at?
Sunday, November 5th, 2006About a week before I left for my vacation, Paul Pival, Ken Varnum and David Rothman had an interesting distributed discussion about how students are perceiving the research literature and are evaluating the quality of documents given that, online, everything looks virtually the same (and even more so when you’re looking at an RSS [...]
Zotero - is this what we’ve been waiting for?
Saturday, September 23rd, 2006I got my library a trial of RefWorks this summer (with the way our distance learners do school work — often at home and work — it makes much more sense for us to make a Web-based citation manager available to them), but it didn’t really meet with an enthusiastic response by the students and [...]
Selling information literacy — reflections after one year
Saturday, July 29th, 2006The other day, I got an e-mail from a reader of my blog: “You mentioned in one of your more recent posts that you’ve learned what works and what doesn’t in “selling” information literacy to faculty. Could you elaborate? I suspect that I will have to be doing a lot of that in the near [...]
